The automobile giant Mahindra Group plans to set up five engineering colleges to tackle a shortage of manpower in the country.
The venture will be spearheaded by group company Tech Mahindra Ltd, which sells telecommunications software. The first engineering college will come up in Chandigarh, where land has been allotted to the group, and they expect to start academic sessions from 2008. The group has identified land in Maharashtra and Goa for the second and third campuses, while the search was still on for the other two campuses, he added. Mahindra will spend INR 250 crore in this venture. Auto makers have previously said they have a hard time hiring the right people because of a dearth of talent, made worse by intensified competition. Companies across industries such as automobiles and information technology are allying with academic institutions and industrial training institutes for training their workforce and enhancing productivity levels. The country's top 5 software companies will together spend close to Rs1,721 crore this fiscal year in training around 100,000 engineers they would have hired in the same period. Each Mahindra campus will be supported by the state-of-the-art IT infrastructure and will specialize in a certain area of expertise, which they will share with the others through video courses.
